Following a major hiccup two weeks ago, campaign season for the upcoming SRC elections has kicked into high gear once more.
The elections are usually our annual cue to bemoan the apathy that affects most students at this university, but this year is marginally different.
While the three VP contests are woefully without contest, one of the races – that for President of the Council – at least has some competition in it, with four candidates vying for the revered post.
However, to date, none of them have shown a solid enough understanding of what the job actually entails.
The 2010-2011 presidential campaign opened, and has continued, as a contest to win votes by loving Bishop’s more than the other candidates.
And while there is nothing wrong with loving Bishop’s, it does not a good president make. The SRC President should love this school, yes, but they need more than that. They should have Macbeth’s ambition, Horatio’s reason and Henry V’s leadership (Falstaff’s liver would come in handy, too).
The SRC is a remarkable institution than can do remarkable things, but only if someone with a slew of concrete plans gets put on top. The presidency is not a job that you can lame-duck for a year; it demands activism.
The Council is also, the candidates surely know, a serious business. It runs on a half-million dollar budget, much of which comes from the students it represents.
It goes without saying that this money cannot be looked after carelessly, and while the buck neither starts nor stops with the President, they should nonetheless come into the office with some plans for the council’s purse.
But such plans and promises have been oddly missing from the campaign so far. Many of the candidates’ platforms have nebulous, and others have included such pledges as promising to oversee the SRC’s operations.
That’s a fine thing to say, but it’s hardly revolutionary – it’s just part of the job description. And you don’t land a cashier job by saying you’re going to handle cash, unless you’re the Muhammad Ali of handling cash.
The four presidential candidates, all of whom performed respectably at Speakers’ Night earlier this week, also share a common thread: none of them are current members of the SRC.
There is nothing wrong with bringing a fresh, outsider perspective to the highest office a student can hold, but there is something to be said for experience within the Council.
The transition from one president to the next can be a sticky one, especially for a newcomer, and this year’s handover will be especially difficult because it has been bumped back a few weeks by the previous nomination debacle.
This is not to say that none of the candidates are worthy of the position – I’ll be voting for one of them, and so should you – but it is interesting that all four are leapfrogging the lesser Council posts and aiming straight for the head job.
It is also curious that no returning councilors opted to run for the presidency, although there’s a decent chance that their reasons differ from one person to the next.
Something will no doubt change in the next few months, and hopefully by April 2011 we’ll be able to look back on this column and say I got the candidates wrong. But it would be nice to be proven wrong before we stuff our votes in the ballot box.
